1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a content distribution technique, particularly relates to a distribution destination selecting technique for selecting a content distribution destination from among a plurality of user terminals used by a user, when the content is distributed to the user.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, multi-device users have been increasing. That is, it is becoming a general trend of utilization form that one user uses a plurality of user terminals including a smartphone, a tablet terminal, and a personal computer. In such a utilization form, a user selectively uses various user terminals according to a usage. Therefore, it is desirable that distributed content be distributed suitably for the purposes.
As a conventional technique for selecting a content distribution destination, a technique has been proposed to distribute the content to a selected distribution destination terminal, based on a user profile including equipped capabilities and a state of availabilities related to the user as a distribution destination, and based on metadata including required capabilities related to the distributed content (refer to Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2004-13424, for example).
In the conventional technique described earlier, the user terminal to be the distribution destination of the content is selected in consideration of hardware aspects including equipped capabilities related to the user terminal. Therefore, a terminal that properly reproduces the distributed content is selected as the distribution destination. However, since there is no consideration in this technique on a fact that the terminals are selectively used by the user corresponding to the actual usage, there has been a problem of not being able to properly select the content distribution destination according to the usage of the user terminal.
Due to this problem, a mismatch occurs, according to the conventional technique, between the distributed content and the distribution destination user terminal, including, for example, such that content with a large number of entry fields is distributed to the smartphone on which an operation burden is heavy in entering characters. Therefore, this has caused a problem that a ratio of causing the user to take an intended action after selecting or browsing the distributed content, has decreased, and leads to a loss of conversion opportunity particularly when the content is advertisement content.